


the very best of reasons

by duckbunny



Category: Mindhunter (TV 2017)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, holden is a necrophile, weird religion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-15
Updated: 2017-10-15
Packaged: 2019-01-17 23:44:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12376596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duckbunny/pseuds/duckbunny
Summary: moments of revelation





	the very best of reasons

Holden was six years old, riding in the back of the car, his feet dangling. He was watching the trees fly past the windscreen, past his dad's head. He was too small back then to see the road. The corners all came as surprises, the dancing trees turning on their toes. He'd seen these trees a hundred times, driving home from town on the weekend. They lulled him almost to dreaming. He didn't see why his dad slammed on the brakes and swore. He only saw the bird flying past the windscreen, its beak open, calling, and the car kicked and shook, and was still.

Later, he would always remember it that way. Even knowing it was a duck, after he ran out of the car to follow his dad and saw the beautiful drake lolling broken on the road, with blood on its beautiful green neck, shimmering under his childish fingers; even knowing that, he always remembered it as a bird, abstract. She was long gone by the time he thought to look for her, leaving her mate on the ground. He could never be entirely sure that she was real. Do the souls of birds look like birds?

He put his hand on the dead bird's wing, expecting it to flap away from him. He kept touching after he realised it never would, trying to understand how something could fly, and then be still.

He was nine years old, and the pastor said every week that Mrs Allen was feeling unwell and needed to be prayed for, until one week he said that Mrs Allen had passed away and there would be a service of remembrance. Holden thought it was because they hadn't seen Mrs Allen since Christmas, so they needed to remember who she was, and he thought that was very nice to make sure she wasn't forgotten about. His mom had to explain it to him the next day and he felt the world shake around him and come down different.

Holden was eighteen, home from college for the summer, when the papers started reporting on a murder. Eight murders, all in one night, all in one house. He bought the morning edition every day and it sat smouldering in his bag until he could get back to his room and pore over it for the new details, speculation, arrests. He followed it all the way to trial. They printed a photograph of the murderer and Holden spent hours looking at him, trying to understand how he could do it, remembering how it felt when metal hit flesh. He thought about the Crucifixion, nails through fragile palms, and the soldiers driving them home with rocks, every blow rippling back through their own hands. Had they been proud of it, following their orders? Had they watched the life leave the Christ and known the moment it happened? Did the sky shake?

How had the murderer found the courage, to make the living things go still?

He was twenty-two and at his first real crime scene. Fifth floor apartment, rented by the deceased. The neighbours had called it in that morning when they saw the tenant dangling from the window, rope around his neck.

Holden stepped carefully through the place, trying to avoid disturbing anything. It wasn't just to keep the evidence intact. Someone had died here, not twelve hours ago. The echo hung in the air like incense. The dead man lay on bare floorboards beneath the window, the noose still tight around his throat.

“Come here, Holden.”

He crouched beside the body and looked at Marchant, the detective assigned to babysit him. “Okay. What am I looking at?”

“You tell me.” Marchant gestured at the corpse invitingly.

The body had pale lips and open, staring eyes. Holden couldn't help staring back. He swallowed. “Uh. Well – I – uh -”

“Touch him.”

Holden stared at Marchant instead. “What?”

“You look terrified. This is your first time? You can't be scared of this guy. Not of him, not of what happened to him. So get comfortable. He's not going to hurt you. Touch him.”

Holden's hand shook, a little, but he reached out and pressed his palm to the dead man's shirt. He was cold, and still, and he yielded like living flesh. His gaze was fixed outside the world. Someone had done this – had opened the gate of the ribs and ushered him through. Something of the beyond clung to Holden's fingertips when he pulled away.

He blew out a shaky breath. “Well, he didn't kill himself.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he'd have had to do it twice. He was shot _and_ hanged, and he could have done either of those to himself but – I don't think he could climb out the window, with a rope around his neck, _after_ he was shot in the chest. And if he'd shot himself after, the gun would be on the ground outside, and there's a handgun on the table. It might be the murder weapon.”

“Not bad.” Marchant tilted the corpse's face, touching its jaw with no sign of strain. It felt sacrilegious. “Plus, we know this guy. He's got connections to the local mob. My guess is, he got out of line, they came to make a point, and we'll only catch the perp if he fucked up somehow. You don't hang a man out over the street unless you've got something to say.”

He replayed the scene in his head, when he should have been studying, when he should have been doing his paperwork, when he was trying to fall asleep. The sensation of touching the dead man, the shock up his arm and through his gut. He couldn't let it go.

There had been another bird, when he was fifteen. He had thought himself very bold and fierce, as fourteen-year-olds do. He had scrambled his way through the woods to where the curving river made a tiny pebble beach, and kicked off his shoes to wade into the water, every sunny day of the endless summer. He tried to catch little river-fish in his hands, but he never could get a grip on them. The water curled around his toes and made his feet into alien shapes, warped and numbed by the ripples.

The grackle came floating down the river while Holden was digging for creepy-crawlies with a stick. For a moment he thought it was dead, until he saw it trying to flap its wings. He watched it swimming, struggling towards a bank and making no progress, until finally something clicked in his head and he waded over to it. He plucked it out of the water to cradle between his hands.

It struggled, instinctively, but without strength. Its wings fluttered in his grip. Feathers stroked the soft insides of his wrists, knife-edged shadows brushing his skin. Holden held on tight. The bones of the bird's ribcage pressed against his fingers as it screamed.

He squeezed. The bird beat its trapped wings. He could crush down until its breastbone snapped and pierced its tiny heart. He could twist its head and give it a swift mercy. He could hold it beneath the water and let it float away as if only time and fate had ever touched it, and he imagined that, imagined the taste of river water flung up into his mouth by the bird fighting to breathe, and his cock rose and his heart pounded as fast as the bird's under his hands.

Holden waded back to the little beach. He put the bird down. It stood with its wings half mantled and its beak open, panting. He dug a worm out of the bank and snipped it in half with a thumbnail, so it wouldn't escape, and left it on a rock for the grackle to eat. He went home.

The next day there were black feathers strewn on the little pebble beach.

Holden was twenty-six and negotiating with a bank robber. He'd taken three customers hostage and driven the bank staff out into the freezing rain, to stagger into the arms of police with grey blankets and notebooks. That left Holden to call across the wet tarmac to the frightened man in the doorway.

Holden could see how scared he was. He'd come for the money, he hadn't wanted a fight. Holden told him so, at the top of his voice, keeping his voice pitched high and sweet. He wouldn't make threats. The situation was hopeless and all he had to do was keep it playing out until the perpetrator decided he wanted to live.

It ended with a police rush, the moment Holden persuaded him to put the shotgun down. He ended on the floor, his hands twisted back into cuffs and his face ground into the tarmac, the rain still beating down. Holden patted the hand of the old lady who sat on the floor, too stiff to jump right up now the danger was gone, and waved away her thanks. He told her it was just his job.

He thrummed with anger. The robber had come in here with a gun and menaced these people and he hadn't even meant it. A killer should mean it. A death should be noticed. That crack in reality; that opening of the way; it shouldn't be done for the sake of a few hundred dollars stolen cash. How dare anyone invite death into their path and treat it like a servant? How could he be so reckless with the powers?

Holden had never killed. He felt it like a loose tooth, something he couldn't help worrying at. The understanding was in him of what it meant and he had never done it. There was a holiness he could not touch. He was not ready for the transcendence. There was no choir to sing him into chains and strew his path with bloody petals, on the walk to the lightning throne. He remembered the bird flying, the bird in his hands, the closed door.

He studied the men who had dared what he could not. He read every detail of their ascending. He waited to grow his wings.


End file.
